Campus incidents prompt call for action in Poway school district

POWAY - A nonprofit community group of minority students and
parents asked Poway Unified School District trustees this week to
provide teachers and students lessons in diversity and tolerance
after what they described as racially offensive incidents at two
campuses last month.

District officials said Tuesday that the first incident, on Oct.
4, involved a noose hung by an unknown person on the inside of a
boy's bathroom stall at Poway High School. They said that as part
of a Halloween event on campus Oct. 31, a Westview High School
student wore a costume that resembled a Ku Klux Klan outfit.

Both incidents are being investigated by district officials. San
Diego County Sheriff's Deputies were asked to investigate the
incident where the noose was found at Poway High.

The events come in the wake of several noose-related incidents
nationwide, one involving a noose that was hung on a Louisiana high
school campus and others at college campuses in Maryland and New
York.

District officials said they do not think the two incidents were
related.

The Westview student wore a white sheet with a cone-shaped head
during lunch and told campus administrators he was dressed as a
ghost, Assistant Superintendent Mel Robertson said. Administrators
asked the student, whose name will not be released because of
student privacy rules, to remove the outfit before escorting him
off campus, Robertson said.

Robertson declined to say whether the student was
disciplined.

"We have a very diverse group of students attending our school
and it's strongly believed that we need to recognize this problem,"
Mary Allison, a mother of two black students who attend Westview,
told trustees during a board meeting Monday night. "As these things
start to compile, it becomes a real concern for me as a parent and
it needs to be addressed."

Allison told trustees she was speaking on behalf of an
organization called Concerned Parents Alliance. She implored the
board to denounce the two incidents and to develop a program for
teachers, administrators and students that promotes racial
tolerance and diversity.

Board President Jeff Mangum said Tuesday that the unit was not
allowed by law to respond to Allison's statements because the
discussion was not part of the agenda for that night. He said the
district takes both incidents seriously and that racially motivated
acts or hate messages will not be tolerated.

"There is no way that that kind of behavior is acceptable,"
Mangum said. "We will investigate it and if we find that the
behavior is racially motivated, we will take the appropriate
disciplinary action. Every student has the right to feel accepted
and safe, and for one idiot to make a statement or act that
threatens that … is just unacceptable."

Robertson said principals will be meeting with their staffs in
the coming weeks to discuss how they can use the two incidents as
lessons in the classroom.

Several parents and students said the district was not taking
the latest incident seriously, noting that it had not notified
parents and had not set up discussion groups for all students. They
said that even if the district's investigation concludes the two
incidents were not racially motivated, they were both racially
offensive.